Sage Empathy Lab - 21/01/25

 Scene Setting

One of the reasons for starting this blog space was I have been very poor at keeping track of events I've organised with Ministry of Testing. All of them have added value in some way, but if you asked me who spoke in January of last year I would have to go digging before I could tell you, which is unfair to all the people that volunteer to talk for us. What I do know is, at some point last year Martin Underhill did a great introduction to accessibility talk that pulled in people from all sorts of backgrounds and roles and made this, his second appearance at MoT, the prime candidate to begin this blogging adventure. 

(Image of last event Martin ran for Ministry of Testing Newcastle)

The Event

Unfortunately I don't think I recorded everyones names but the Sage Accessibility Team started us off by introducing some really good material and defining for everyone what it meant to be accessible, and thus what it really means to be impaired and and one bullet point from their slides that really hit home the message for me was: Individuals with an impairment are disabled by society, its social structures and its failure to build an inclusive environment.

As the title to this blog has already suggested this event was an accessibility empathy lab. The idea wasn't to make people feel disabled, but to give people some level of insight into the difficulties that users face when they live with impairments and try to complete some of the most basic functions on the world wide web.

I only got one video of the event but it really does highlight just how difficult some of the most common impairments impact some of the most simple tasks. In the video below Michael is trying to find his local GP on the NHS website, who are one of the gold standard organisations when it comes to being accessible.

(A video of Michael, navigating the web wearing goggles to represent cataracts)

Michael was wearing glasses that represented having cataracts. Often a temporary impairment that can be solved with surgery but that makes the experience no easier. You can see that right away Michael had to scale the zoom up to 300%, which in itself is interesting given that WCAG standards only request up to 200%. Clearly Michael had some issues when he was trying to find the correct links, but what was really telling for me was he inputted his postcode wrong twice. I'd say Michael is very comfortable with key location on a keyboard given he is a software developer but he couldn't rely on his eyesight to tell him his postcode still wasn't right!

Another great simulation was the increased resistance to your motor skills, reflective to degenerative conditions like arthritis. It was interesting seeing everyone that joined in this simulator struggle to navigate through the web. Using the mouse to scroll was almost a non-starter and as people tried to use the chrome scroller to navigate up or down they found it difficult to be precise enough to click it without minimising the screen 

 

(A photo of an attendee, wearing gloves to represent the difficulty in moving with a condition like arthritis)

The final simulator I want to highlight was the tunnel vision, which I had a proper go on myself. The challenge I was set was to find the price of an emergency one week passport. Again on a .Gov website, which is very accessible I didn't find this easy and when I saw £207 on the webpage for emergency passports I thought I'd smashed the task! However, that was the price for a one day passport, something I completely missed with my impaired vision.

(A photo of the author, navigating the web wearing goggles to tunnel vision)

Final Notes

So in conclusion, the empathy lab was a huge success. Not only was it clear that people learned and took a lot from it but also that a massive private sector organisation like Sage are taking accessibility seriously, before they legally have to (and that day will come)! So thank you once again to the lab technicians that put on this great event and also to my co-organisers at Ministry of Testing Newcastle. The final image is a bit of MoT fun with our temporary tattoos that were given out on the night too!